We cannot fly out of it to take a picture — well that takes eons and humans invented space travel fairly recently.
And how accurate is that picture?
We cannot fly out of it to take a picture — well that takes eons and humans invented space travel fairly recently.
And how accurate is that picture?
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We know the position, color and brightness of over a billion individual stars in our galaxy. That’s only a small fraction of all stars, but it still gives you a pretty good idea what is where. A computer can then generate an image from any viewing direction you want. Will it look exactly like a picture taken from outside the galaxy, pixel by pixel? No – it’s close enough to be useful.
The images of the entire Milky Way aren’t photos but artistic representations. The actual photos are from inside, like standing on a piece of pepperoni and taking a picture in one direction of the rest of the pizza.
Just to add in… Our closest neighboring galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy is also a large spiral shaped galaxy with arms. Often the representations combine what we know of our galaxy with what we can observe about the Andromeda Galaxy.
Except for the portion opposite the galactic center of our galaxy we know quite a bit about the shape a makeup of our galaxy.